[Quick Hack] How to Add Snapchat Filters to Your Instagram Stories

For new businesses, it can be difficult to keep up with continual onslaught of new social media channels. Do you or don't you try and re-build your following on it. Furthermore, do you even have enough time to manage another channel?

For the last few months, Snapchat, was the latest and greatest social network on the block, however there was one big problem: most businesses and influencers have the majority of their digital fan base across Facebook and Instagram - not on Snapchat (unless you're Kylie Jenner - but that's for another blog post).

With the latest announcement of Instagram stories, businesses and influencers are already finding that they're getting almost 10X the number of story views when posting to Instagram stories now - and it's only been 24 hours with the platform (once more peole upgrade to the new version of the app, those numbers will only go up).

My pal, the crazy-remarkable founder of Collective Hub, Lisa Messenger, and I were just discussing this... yes, over Instagram stories earlier today. She's already seen within the first hour of posting on Instagram stories more than 15x the # of views of her story than on Snapchat. Now, we're not all like Lisa and have 96.2k fans on our personal Instagram accounts, and 127k on our business accounts.

But the logic rings true - if you have more followers of Instagram (which is likely the case), you'll get better exposure. And why not consolidate your channels. Well, I've got good news for you. As we wait for Instagram to bring some of their recently acquired facial recognition software into the Instagram stories platform, there is an easy (albeit time consuming) way to use Snapchat filters within Instagram Stories.

Here is the 10 step hack for using Snapchat filters within Instagram Stories

Step 1: Open Snapchat and take a photo / video selfie with your filter of choice (my favourite at the moment is this filter)

Step 2: Once you've got the perfect snap, save it to your memories by clicking the little arrow inbox icon

Step 3: Open up Snapchat memories (to do that, get ready to take a new photo and instead of taking it, swipe up to reveal memories

Step 4: Tap the memory you just saved, and then click the edit & send button at the bottom

Step 10: Follow me on Instagram and/or Snapchat for more digital marketing and business

Snapcode me on Snapchat 👉

PS: Massive thank you to Lisa Messenger and the Collective Hub team for experimenting with me on this one. Read Lisa's write-up on the latest Snapchat vs. Instagram saga here. And here are more educationsl resources on b2b marketing for those of you interested!

Ryan Bonnici is the Senior Director of Global Marketing at HubSpot. He’s an experienced digital marketing leader having held roles previously at Salesforce, ExactTarget, Microsoft and Qantas Airways. He's an experienced digital marketing consultant having worked with a wide range of businesses from thermal clothing sales to executive coaching services. For more frequent updates, follow him on Facebook (@growthguy) or Twitter (@ryanbonnici)